Saturday July 14th from 3:00pm – 7:00pm – Eat Local First Week Kickoff Party at Acre 121: Beer & BBQ, Admission includes access to live local music, a buffet of local BBQ/sides, and local beer! 21+ only.

Thursday July 19th at 6:00pm – Archives at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage! See Featured July Artist the Archives in full concert at the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, admittance is free! https://www.facebook.com/events/243731659078575/

Saturday July 21st from 1:00pm – 7:00pm– Eat Local First Farm to Street Festival. Enjoy scrumptious dishes made with ingredients from local farms, drink local craft beer and wine, shop local retailers and take craft food classes in the pop-up park, and hear music from Listen Local First Stage!

Featured Local Artists include: Justin Trawick, Flo Anito and many more TBA.

SAVE THE DATE:

August 4th and 5th – Mid City Dog Days of Summer Street Festival! With street musicians, never-ending sidewalk sales, restaurant specials, and events up and down the corridor, the 2012 MidCity Dog Days will be the biggest one yet. Listen Local First Street Music Showcase: Listen Local First will organize pop up street music performances throughout the MidCity Corridor including the Mobile Music Venue—creating alternate exposure opportunities for talented local musicians. www.midcitydogdays.com

The Eighteenth Street Lounge made a name for itself bringing in and supporting electronic music inthe District. In April they released ESL radio, a streaming web radio station aimed at broadening anddemocratizing the Eighteenth Street Lounge experience. Listen Local First’s Matthew Nahmias held this Q & A with ESL Radio founder Rob Connelly to learn more about the stream and to see what they have planned for the future.

Listen Local First: Right now you have six regularly scheduled shows, but ESL radio isavailable 24/7. What are we listening to when one of those shows isn’t streaming?

ESL Radio: Similar to most commercial radio stations, ESL Radio has a “format.” Ours is made up of the “ESL Sound,” combining electronic, dub, afro, funk, world, reggae, and trip hop sounds into a blend of programming designed to send listeners into a mild state of euphoria. The programming also features the specialty shows that you refer to. These shows are consistent with the programming of ESL Radio in general.

Is the focus more on streaming performances at Eighteenth Street Lounge live, or is it ongiving ESL label artists an outlet to share the music they listen to through their own shows?

Both. Live performances of the DJ sets at the Eighteenth Street Lounge make up the bulk of our “Live from the Lounge” schedule. Think of this as a normal rock station that plays a blend of rock music all day, and then takes listeners “live” in venue for Live from the Lounge as a specialty feature. Of course the core of the program is heavily dosed with ESL artists and other similar artists and friends who’ve created in the ESL sound over the years.

Do you have plans to expand the line-up?

Yes, of course! Radio is a moving, changing, and evolving medium, and as opportunities arise we will use them to create new programming and new ways to collect that programming to deliver the freshest, most unique product on the radio or online. ESL Radio is broadcasting the upcoming DJ set from Ravin for example live at Buddha Bar on Thursday May 10. ESL Radio will also broadcast the full day stage at the Electric Forest Festival in late June.

Are you restricting shows to ESL label artists, or are you interested in adding shows by DJsyou like that aren’t on the label?

Everyone is included, so long as the music matches the format and the artist has a unique style. Ravin, for example, does his own stuff like the Buddha Bar compilations.

Have you been tracking listeners so far?

Yes. Statistics are not the best in terms of a really reliable system, but we do get a snapshot and over time that snapshot becomes more of a picture and so on. ESL Radio kicked off April 13-15, and the stats over that weekend showed over 2600 people tuned in in 65 countries. Approximately 2/3 of them were from the DC metro area. For comparison, CNN has 357,000 viewers on a given night. The numbers of listeners and where they are from will become clearer over the coming months.

What is your intended audience?

As with anything, pretty much everyone. Obviously the ESL Brand, style and lifestyle guides our marketing and defines our audience. For the most part, they are upscale, progressive, conscientious stewards of our planet as well as educated consumers of righteous music.

One of your shows, “The Gourmet Lounge,” is billed as a musical cooking show. What wasthe inspiration for a radio cooking show, and how do you plan to keep the show engagingwithout a video element?

ESL Radio extends beyond its music with promotional elements designed to accommodate the lifestyle of its audience. Cooking, food, wine and entertainment is certainly in the wheelhouse. The Gourmet Lounge each week gives a local chef the opportunity to cook, instruct, promote and show the tips and tricks of the pros. A show can actually be more engaging without the video element, as radio has long proven over the years. The mind and imagination of the audience is more powerful, and the relaxed atmosphere of an instructional dinner party on the radio with musical interludes is really quite unique. The show will feature downloadable recipes from the website where listeners can actually create the dishes of their favorite restaurants.

ESL hosts the DC Flag Day concert series and celebrations starting at 8 pm this Thursday, June 14.

Second Annual DC Flag Day Celebration, Thursday June 14th – The Rally and Party sponsored by DC Vote, LLF and L.U.V DC will start in Dupont Circle and end at Eighteenth Street Lounge – More Details HERE

Today begins a ten-day, multi-venue celebration of jazz in Duke Ellington’s hometown. Consisting of over 100 performances, from elegant presentations at the Kennedy Center to outdoor family festivals to late-night club parties, the DC Jazz Festival offers enough choices to make a music lover’s head spin. But there’s one offering that stands apart from the rest: CapitalBop’s Jazz Loft Series, culminating in the Jazz Loft MegaFest. A unique, multimedia experience of the creative community of jazz, the Jazz Loft MegaFest, June 9 from 3 p.m. to 2 a.m., also presents an exciting opportunity to listen local.

CapitalBop, founded in 2010 by Giovanni Russonello, aims to unite and highlight the vibrant jazz scene that calls DC its home. “I’ve always been a huge fan of jazz,” says Russonello. “But when I was going out to jazz shows as a kid, what I noticed was, no one was at them! There’d be these amazing shows with just very small audiences… CapitalBop was founded on the premise that the DC jazz scene itself has never lacked for impressive experiences, high-quality art, and exciting personalities. What people don’t understand, especially in this town, is they think it’s this historical art form that loses relevance as time passes. But for all the tropes, it’s not dying, and it never will die. It’s improvisatory, and it changes with the times. Because it’s made in the moment, you experience its creation, and that’s why live jazz shows are so thrilling…I thought of magazines like Time Out New York and the Village Voice, or the City Paper here in Washington. They serve an important purpose just by letting people know what’s going on around here. So I wanted to create something like that: an online home for the DC jazz scene.”

Soon after the CapitalBop site launched in 2010, Russonello’s friend and collaborator Luke Stewart joined him as an editor. Stewart’s band, Laughing Man, rented space at Gold Leaf Studios (a.k.a. Red Door), which became the home for the DC Jazz Loft Series starting that December. Russonello calls the Loft Series “unmediated spaces for unmediated music.”

“DC jazz performers and audiences needed not just an online resource, but to experience different presentations of the scene, get it out of the club circuit and give young people—and everyone else who may not have known about what’s happening here—a chance to participate in the jazz scene.”

The site launched in September 2010. The first project was a calendar of jazz events all over the city, which exists today as a complete, monthly catalog of every single upcoming show in DC. Beyond basic event info, the calendar contains previews, descriptions, and editor recommendations regarding each event, “so that you’ll know what you’re going to get out of every show,” as Russonello said. But there’s more to building a music scene’s online home. “The site itself is built around being most utilitarian to those who don’t know the scene,” said Russonello. As such, it also hosts a guide to DC’s jazz-friendly neighborhoods and the bars and clubs where jazz cats play. Its front page and blog are home to a wealth of articles, videos and photos. Posts may be video previews for shows, profiles of dynamic local artists, or info on the city’s weekend lineup.

The concert series known as the DC Jazz Loft Series, on the other hand, gained prominence at last year’s Jazz Fest. Russonello considers working with an organization as large and respected as the DC Jazz Fest to have been a major taking-off point for CapitalBop, which presented four Loft Series shows for Jazz Fest last year. “For every show, we paired really renowned bands from out of town—last year they were all from New York—with local bands. It both gave the most innovative musicians in the country a home right here in DC, and gave the local bands a lot of really good exposure as the openers for nationally renowned groups.” Among CapitalBop’s local collaborators are two of Listen Local First’s featured artists for the month of June, Donvonte McCoy and Kris Funn, who headlined CapitalBop’s section of Lumen8Anacostia earlier this year. Russonello said that the success of last year’s Loft Series also greatly increased traffic to the CapitalBop site. “It’s interesting, because we started the site as a tool to get people out to the live shows, but it turns out to work the other way around as well.”

This year, CapitalBop is presenting some similar Loft Series shows to last year’s: nationally renowned groups paired with local jazz bands. The Todd Marcus Jazz Orchestra, unique in that it is led by a bass clarinet, headlines with Christie Dashiell Quartet tonight (6/1/12) at The Dunes, and Kris Funn & Corner Store—one of LLF’s June featured artists—open for “absolute star” group Tarbaby on Saturday 6/2 at The Fridge.

But the big event, the Jazz Loft MegaFest, is in a whole other league. From 3 p.m. to 2 a.m., visitors to the three-floor “loft” at 629 New York Avenue will experience music, film, food and fun as only DC could do it. MegaFest will feature:

-Concerts all day, leading up to a two-set headline show by Marc Cary’s Cosmic Indigenous
“Danceable, futurist, roots-exploring but also totally experimental jazz”

Russonello says that the diverse multimedia format of MegaFest “stresses the idea that jazz is a way of integrating thoughts, feelings, and experience into a real-time form of expression. It’s music that really knows no bounds, because you can create what you want, and create with your heart, and have the musical vocabulary to do that…It’s really about creating a community around an art form, or around the shared experience of art being created in front of you. The most exciting thing is how much of an experience it will be.”

PANEL DISCUSSION – Web Streaming and Tech Development for a Local Music Community

In order to develop a thriving cultural community, artists musicians and fans must explore and adopt new technologies and platforms that enhance promotion and distribution of the arts. Join us on Thursday May 17th to hear from DC developing media and technology platforms who are striving to better the local cultural community.

Two months ago, Neal Humphrey, avid fiddle player and project manager at an energy efficiency nonprofit, was itching to connect with other musicians. For over a year, Neal had been part of a bluegrass band (The Family Hammer), but when two band members moved out of the city, he was left band-less and anxious to start something new. He added, “After four years in DC, I knew about twenty-five decent musicians that I could call up to jam with, but most were of the folk or bluegrass genre. I wanted to experiment with some new styles, and find people that I really connected with musically.”

Good ideas move quickly. Within a few weeks, a cohort of musicians, eager to experiment with new sounds and new people, had devised a plan. Brannon Walsh, EPA environmental scientist and guitar/harmonica player, offered to host the event. Another person offered to provide professional recordings of the performances. With a location set, the recruitment process began. Neal described his community-based outreach strategy – “I told all the musicians I knew to tell at least three other musicians. Pretty soon we had forty people signed up.”

At the end of February, a swath of DC musicians with an array of musical backgrounds came together for a meet-n-greet that strayed far from the normal business card schmoozing. After six hours of high-energy trial and error, nine bands had formed with one month to prepare, practice, and perform a fifteen-minute set of their choosing, including at least one original song written since the bands’ inception. This past Saturday, April 14, marked the culmination of Neal’s labor – over 30 musicians who were previously strangers churned out a one-time, four hour performance as “flash bands”. If you didn’t hear about this event, there’s a reason. No facebook invites, no emails. Strictly word –of-mouth hype for a night of genuine musical talent and genre exploration. Over one hundred people came out for a fusion-filled night of everything from dubstep hip hop to indie bluegrass to punk(ish) rock.

In DC, we see the rise of the hobbyist. Many local jobs don’t have the cut-throat, 16 hour work days of faster moving cities like New York or Chicago, allowing time to cultivate and pursue interests. In many ways, DC has a uniquely creative environment where people aren’t necessarily interested in having their hobby become their career. Since people aren’t trying to “make it” in the music industry, it fosters an authentically collaborative atmosphere, especially evident in the “Flash Band” performance this past weekend. Admittedly, this crammed house concert, with backdrops of Diego Rivera-like murals and LED certified Christmas lights, at times felt like a college party revival (and will undoubtedly be snubbed by some as a byproduct of pervasive gentrification of Columbia Heights). But, the energy, attitude and talent are a reminder that DC can be both a straight-laced policy grate and a creative hub.

The next Flash Band event will start at 5 PM on Saturday, July 14 at the Half Street Fairgrounds beside Nationals Stadium. Check out the newly updated flashbandproject.org for up-to-date information about future events and recordings of Flash Band performances!

If you’re interested in participating in the next Flash Band event, or are otherwise interested in creative ways to grow the local DC music scene, please contact Neal Humphrey at humphrey.neal@gmail.com.